Safire: Stem-cell debate: Reagan's next victory?

WILLIAM SAFIRE

Published 5:30 am, Tuesday, June 8, 2004

The outpouring of respect and affection for Ronald Reagan -- the principled president and principal Alzheimer's victim -- may help resolve the impasse blocking greater federal support of the use of embryonic stem cells in biomedical research.

Today's stem-cell debate is more far-reaching than Iraq, tax policy or Medicare. How do we follow the promise of genetic cures for terrible diseases without falling into the abyss of unrestricted human cloning?

President Bush wrestled with this two years ago. He came up with a compromise that permitted federally financed research on the few cell lines existing then, but not on new lines until we thought this issue through.

Embryonic stem cells may bring new life to dying organs, including the brain. They are taken from blastocysts, the union of sperm and egg that -- less than two weeks old -- can fit on a pinhead. Opponents say the harvesting of these cells destroys potential human life; proponents say these are left over from in vitro banks and already destined for destruction, donated by people to whom "pro life" also means saving the lives of suffering patients.

supported, developed 17 new lines of cells and is making them freely available. South Korean researchers went further, extracting stem cells responsibly from a cloned human embryo. And now the state of California will vote in

November whether to go deeper into debt with a $3 billion bond issue to advance this biomedical research.

The genetics is out of the bottle. This research, whether the government likes it or not, is growing apace. Unless we act now to direct it toward morally acceptable ends -- cure and treatment of disease and the extension of active life, not monstrous manipulation and production of clones for spare parts -- we risk losing the imperfectibility that makes us human.

Fortunately, the diverse commission of ethicists and scientists appointed by Bush has done some serious thinking and writing about this. I called attention to its "Beyond Therapy" report last year, and urge you to read "Reproduction and Responsibility" now. Its thought-provocation, a rarity in government documents, is available free at www.bioethics.gov.

The commission chairman, Leon Kass, a lucid scientific ethicist, urges scientists "to join the regulatory discussion and propose some principles and boundaries." At the same time, the conservative Kass writes that "prudent defenders of the sanctity of human life should realize that it is a

Pyrrhic victory to keep the federal government out of certain activities, if the price of such a stance means that worse practices are allowed to proceed without oversight or regulation in the private sector."

Though the commission is silent on research based on biomedical cloning, which the Koreans have already done, Dartmouth College's Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, would go further than his colleagues: "Congress could vote to outlaw reproductive cloning.

At the same time, they could allow biomedical cloning to go forward."

Congress may not be ready to take that step; any cloning seems like the slippery slope, and some argue that we should see if adult stem cells may someday do the regenerative trick. But "someday" doesn't help today's victims. Support is growing for federal regulation of new reproductive techniques, combined with approval of the use in medical research of some of the several hundred thousand frozen embryos stored in fertilization clinics now likely to be destroyed.

Here is where the ghost of Ronald Reagan comes in. Nancy Reagan has for some time advocated bringing the talents and financial muscle of the National Institutes of Health to bear on diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes.

The widowed former first lady speaks for herself; her husband's views on this will never be known. And perhaps it is unfair to allow sentiment to influence an ethical debate.

But if public opinion, already trending toward the rights of the afflicted, can be affected by the association of the warmly remembered Reagan name with a federal impetus to stem-cell research and rigorous cloning control, I say it's a good thing. If such regulatory legislation passed by Congress included a Reagan Biomedical Research Initiative at NIH, President Bush should feel comfortable in signing it.

Safire is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of the New York Times, based in Washington, D.C.